Joe@Nitobi

April 30th, 2008

I got an e-mail from some of the VanLUG people saying that they want a repeat of the OpenWebVancouver presentation. I’m constantly re-tooling it, and once I know for certain when I will be presenting it, I’ll have more information. The presentation does need some polish since I went straight to the demo halfway through the presentation before I really got a chance to talk about other things with FreeTheNet.

Also, it should be noted that I’m going to test a sync script on this blog shortly.

Posted in FtN, VONIC, openwebvan | No Comments »

April 17th, 2008

OpenWebVancouver was a very interesting conference. It’ll be interesting to see all the presentations, and I enjoyed the Google Gears presentation, as well as the other presentations. I also liked the RIA with Open Standards presentation, as well as the keynotes by both Zak Graent and Tim Bray. I wish I could have seen the merb presentation again, and I regret missing Microformats, but I had other obligations in the afternoon that caused me to miss those presentations.

My presentation seemed to have gone fairly well. We introduced DogOnRails and talked about OpenMesh, Meraki and FON. I think that my criticism of the lack of openness on their part is valid. However, I’m hoping that people understand that the reason we don’t use Open-Mesh’s dashboard is more to do with our users data and less to do with the people involved. If Open-Mesh.com was in Canada, we would consider using it, but since it’s in the US, and we’re dealing with people’s data, we don’t. I have no problems with Open-Mesh.com as a company per se, I have problems with data about which users are in what area of town being stored in the United States and being subject to the PATRIOT act, and other intrusive laws. The data is really the key behind our decision to keep FreeTheNet’s auth servers in Canada under our control, since while MAC addresses and geographical locations may seem pretty mundane to most people, it’s scary enough that we take privacy seriously. We’ll still buy hardware from Open-Mesh.com, but we’ll use our own version of the firmware, since we all agree on Open Hardware and Open Standards.

My presentation should be uploaded sometime in the next couple of weeks, and people can check back to the OpenWebVancouver site to check it out.

Posted in GPL, Linux, VONIC, openwebvan | 2 Comments »

April 11th, 2008

It finally exists. After months of blood, sweat and tears of the FreeTheNet volunteers, we are now a society and we are ready to rock with our new Open-Mesh.com routers configured with our new firmware. We plan on being able to have the new Open-Mesh/DogOnRails routers ready for people to buy at the conference. This is pretty much what we’ve been waiting to get done for months, since this allows us to own things collectively, like network connections, and it allows us to pool our resources.

I’ll have info up soon for how to buy a Co-Op membership, and what the pricing scales are like for Personal, Not-For-Proft & Co-Ops and Businesses. I’m seriously thinking that we can beat the naysayers and further establish ourselves as truly doing something different. We have to iron out some bugs in DogOnRails and style the app, but we’re going to be ready to rock on Monday.

Posted in VONIC, mesh, openwebvan | No Comments »

April 3rd, 2008

The last couple of weeks, I’m back spending 100% of my dev time working on Ubuntu, which is good, since I’m going to be presenting DogOnRails and WifiDog at Open Web Vancouver. I’m not sure what exactly I’ll be demoing at Open Web, but it will definitely be a refresh of the current DogOnRails interface at the very least. Hopefully, after tonight’s FreeTheNet meeting, we’ll have a good idea of what exactly we’ll be presenting. Depending on what goes down, it will definitely impact the VONIC presentation.

You can check the schedule here.

Also, the Vancouver Open Network Initiatives Cooperative has sent its paperwork into Victoria for incorporation. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens next.

Posted in Rails, Ruby, openwebvan | No Comments »

March 19th, 2008

The OpenWebVancouver schedule is up, and I’m the first person giving a presentation in Room 2 after the Keynote by Tim Bray on Monday. That’s pretty exciting. The presentation is going to be on Embedded Devices that talk to web applictions. I’m going to talk about FreeTheNet, but I’m also wanting to talk about other devices as well. I know that there’s plants that twitter, and other home automation, but if you can give an example of a Web 2.0 Dashboard (that means DOES NOT require a refresh for updates, uses a web service, and generally looks slick, please let me know). I’d prefer OpenWRT or Arduino based stuff, but anything that is embedded linux based would be good.

In other news, the Vancouver Open Network Initiatives Cooperative, the people who brought you FreeTheNet, are coming out with SuperMesh!!!! I’ll be giving more info on that as it develops.

Update: I’m no longer the first person in Room 2. You should STILL go to OpenWebVan and check it out!

Posted in mesh, openwebvan | No Comments »